A Dictatorship Without a Dictator

On January 28, 1979, Deng Xiaoping touched down in America for the first presidential summit since Jimmy Carter finalized relations with the People’s Republic. It was a pivotal meeting, but neither side had anticipated one thing: Deng was a natural. Clad in a Mao suit, and standing barely five feet four, he donned a ten-gallon hat and hammed it up for the cameras at a rodeo in Texas; he took the controls of a space-shuttle simulator in Houston; he gamely stared up at the Harlem Globetrotters at the Kennedy Center. Behind closed doors, he was no less confident and commanding: when he informed Carter that China planned to attack Vietnam, the U.S. President could do little more than mildly urge restraint. Deng’s power was so evident that Carter’s adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski later wrote, “I secretly wished that Deng’s appreciation of the uses of power would also rub off on some of the key U.S. decision makers.”

How times have changed. As Chinese president Hu Jintao prepares to visit Washington for a summit that is being hailed as the most crucial in years, the focus is not on how much authority the Chinese leader brings, but on how little. In 1979, China was weak and impoverished, and its leader was strong. (Up to a point. Americans overestimated Deng’s power at home, as he negotiated internal struggles, but the overall point holds.) Today, China’s national strength is beyond dispute, and its leader is a colorless figure. China has become a dictatorship without a dictator.

Let me be clear: I’m not mourning the decline of dictators. On the contrary, when Deng sent his countrymen into Vietnam, it was a disaster that cost China twenty thousand dead, wounded, or missing troops, and forced a hasty retreat. The perils of unimpeded power became clear once again a decade later, when Deng sent in the military to crush Chinese student demonstrations in 1989.

But in the intervening years, he also demonstrated the ability to make bold, difficult choices: He led China down the path of reform, righted the state system after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, fended off hardliners who sought to derail economic and social opening up, and succeeded in keeping the military in the barracks and out of power.

These days, Beijing is ruled by committees, and it can be difficult to know which committees. Banking and commerce bureaucracies openly differ over the need for currency appreciation. Chinese oil companies have powerful voices in policymaking, while the diplomat Dai Bingguo—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s counterpart—doesn’t even rate a seat on the Politburo. Even when the Obama Administration believes it has won commitments from President Hu on matters of trade and diplomacy, action has been slow to follow. “There is a remarkable amount of chaos in the system, more than you ever saw dealing with the Chinese twenty years ago,” Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser told the Times over the weekend.

What are we to make of this? The optimistic view is that this proliferation of interests is exactly what Westerners should want and recognize: a more pluralistic China, less dependent on the charisma or caprice of a single leader. Perhaps—and, indeed, the Chinese people today enjoy far greater personal freedom than when Deng was in power. But, even without a dictator, the endurance of a dictatorship with no meaningful mechanism for public oversight allows its leaders to act in a spirit driven chiefly by caution, self-protection, and mutual suspicion. In a leaked U.S. cable, an American diplomat described the upper reaches of Chinese leadership recently as “an ossified system in which ‘vested interests’ drove decision-making and impeded reform as leaders maneuvered to ensure that those interests were not threatened.”

That is a leadership culture that steers China’s government toward conservative decisions that are oriented, above all, to maintain the status quo. (The same can be said of our own system these days, though for different reasons. A discussion for another day.) China has made progress in ending the age of the dictator, but, without any leaders who have a clear public mandate, China is poorly equipped to strike the difficult compromises that are needed to extend its rise, much less combat nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea or rebalance the global economic system.

In the weeks and months leading up to Hu’s trip, U.S. diplomats in Beijing have whispered privately that their Chinese counterparts seem less concerned with laying the way for major policy objectives than with simply ensuring the kind of grand optics befitting a proud new superpower. They are entitled to that treatment, but pomp without substance won’t do much to earn this summit—or this generation of Chinese leadership—an honored place in history.

Photograph: Larry Downing-Pool/Getty Images

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.